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RLG Religion CoursesRLG100Y1 An introductory study of the ideas, attitudes, practices, and contemporary situation of
the Judaic, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist, and Shinto religious
traditions. RLG101Y1 Theories about the variety and nature of religious experience, personal and collective. How religious life is expressed in such forms as myth, narrative and ritual, systems of belief and value, morality and social institutions. RLG200Y1 The academic study of religion as a multidisciplinary enterprise. The disciplinary
fields: their strengths and weaknesses. Representative theories on religion by scholars in
various humanities and social sciences. Problems and issues in the selection and use of
theories and methods. RLG201Y1 The meaning of religious symbolism fundamental to the myths, rites, and images of prehistoric and tribal peoples, using a comparative approach to the history of religions as developed by Mircea Eliade. RLG202Y1 An introduction to the religious tradition of the Jews, from its ancient roots to its modern crises. Focus on great ideas, thinkers, books, movements, sects, and events in the historical development of Judaism through its four main periods - biblical, rabbinic, medieval, and modern. RLG203Y1 An introduction to the Christian religious tradition as it has developed from the 1st century C.E. to the present and has been expressed in teachings, institutions, social attitudes, and the arts. RLG204Y1 The faith and practice of Islam: historical emergence, doctrinal development, and
interaction with various cultures throughout the world. RLG205Y1 A historical and thematic introduction to the Hindu religious tradition as embedded in the socio-cultural structures of India. RLG206Y1 The teachings of the Buddha and the development, spread, and diversification of the Buddhist tradition from southern to northeastern Asia. RLG207H1 Sikh religious teachings, practices and institutions; the founder, Guru Nanak, and the scripture, the Adi Granth; subsequent Gurus, other Sikh texts and the religious aspects of the history of the Sikh community in India and abroad. RLG209H1 Basic teachings and historical developments of the Jain religious tradition, with attention to Jain contributions to religious philosophy, ethics, religious biography, literature and the arts. RLG210Y1 Religion from the sociological viewpoint; religion as the source of meaning, community
and power; conversion and commitment; religious organization, movements, and authority;
the relation of religion to the individual, sexuality and gender; conflict and change;
religion and secularization. Emphasis on classical thinkers (Durkheim, Marx, Weber) and
contemporary applications. RLG211Y1 A survey of the various psychological approaches to aspects of religion such as
religious experience, doctrine, myth, ritual, community, ethics and human transformation.
The historical place of introspective, psychoanalytic, humanistic and transpersonal
methods in the psychology of religion. RLG220H1 This course deals with how the momentous experience of the Holocaust, the systematic state-sponsored murder of six million Jews as well as many others, has forced thinkers, both religious and secular, to rethink the human condition. RLG221H1 A brief survey of the Jewish biblical and rabbinic traditions; the extension of these teachings and methods of interpretation into the modern period; common and divergent Jewish positions on pressing moral issues today. RLG222H1 Reason and experience (the natural law tradition) and revelation as the bases for moral judgment; faith and morality; freedom of conscience and the Church's claim to be a moral teacher; relevance to contemporary Catholic moral theology. RLG223H1 The development of Protestant ethics since the Reformation. Gospel and law, love and justice, realism and perfectionism, moral norms and moral context, the personal, political, and economic orders. RLG228H1 The ethics and religious symbolism of environmental change: animal domestication and experimentation, deforestation, population expansion, energy use, synthetics, waste and pollution. RLG230Y1 The ways in which selected texts from a variety of cultures and times are linked both to specific religious traditions as well as to broader notions of what it means to be "religious." Concepts to be treated may include identity, suffering, duty, class, individuality, community, tradition, innovation, loss, consolation, memory, time, beauty, creation, nature, feminism, and colonialism. RLG231Y1 The impact of the physical and social sciences on religion and religious thought. A
comparative philosophical study of scientific and theological ways of analysis and of the
status of scientific and religious assertions. Areas of cooperation and of conflict
between the "two cultures." RLG232H1 The role of film as a mediator of thought and experience concerning religious worldviews. The ways in which movies relate to humanity's quest to understand itself and its place in the universe are considered in this regard, along with the challenge which modernity presents to this task. Of central concern is the capacity of film to address religious issues through visual symbolic forms. RLG233H1 Continued investigation into the relations between religion and film. Distinguished from RLG232H according to the concerns of the instructor. RLG237Y1 The social and legal status of women in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The historical and contemporary situation of women in these traditions. RLG239H1 Some topic of central interest to students of religion, treated on a once-only basis by a professor visiting from another university. For details of this year's offering, consult the Department's current undergraduate handbook. RLG240Y1 The history and surviving documents of Judaism and Christianity, and of religious movements underlying and associated with them from about 200 BCE to about 70 CE. RLG241Y1 An introduction to New Testament literature, examined within the historical context of the first two centuries. No familiarity with Christianity or the New Testament is expected. RLG274H1 The religions and philosophies of China, including ancient religion and mythology, the
three traditions of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism (including their philosophical
dimensions), and Chinese popular religion. RLG275H1 The religions of Japan (Shinto, Buddhism, Confucianism) and the religions of Korea
(Confucianism, Buddhism, Shamanism). RLG280Y1 An alternative version of the content covered by RLG 100Y,
for students in second year or higher who cannot or do not wish to take a further
100-level course. Students attend the RLG 100Y lectures
and tutorials but are expected to produce more substantial and more sophisticated written
work, and are required to submit an extra written assignment. RLG299Y1 Credit course for supervised participation in faculty research project. See page 42 for details. RLG301H1 Systematic analysis of Freud's main writings on religion, studied within the context of
central concepts and issues in psychoanalysis such as: the Oedipus Complex, the meaning
and function of symbols, the formation of the ego and the superego, and the relations
between the individual and culture. RLG302H1 Jung's analysis of the development of the personality through its life cycle, and of
the central place which religion holds within the process of maturation. The unconscious,
the collective unconscious, dreams, myths, symbols, and archetypes; implications for
religious thought, therapy, education, and definitions of community. RLG303H1 Problems of negative life experience and their relations to issues of meaning and
personality development. Includes discussion of internal conflict and suffering in the
experience of melancholia and the divided self, and the existential experiences of evil
and suffering. Examines myth, symbol, and forms of religious discourse as responses to
such crises. RLG304H1 Theories of the self that involve the constitutive role of language in its various
forms. Problems of socially-conditioned worldviews and sense of self as related to
discourse. Myth, symbol, metaphor, and literary arts as vehicles for personality
development and self-transformation along religious lines. RLG307Y1 Sociological examination of religion in contemporary Canadian society: religions of
English and French Canada; religious organization and demography; relation of religion to
ethnicity, social questions and politics; secularization and privatization. RLG309Y1 The relationships between religious and ethical norms, social and political ideals, and
systems of law. The roots of Western legal concepts such as authority, duty, rights, and
punishment in biblical and natural law tradition, and their counterparts in positive law
theory. Church and State conflict in a philosophy of law context. RLG310H1 Historical and critical-philosophical examination of the development of atheism in
Western intellectual circles. Consideration of 18th, 19th and 20th century critiques of
religion derived from: theories of knowledge that privilege science; radical social and
political thought; and analysis of the soul and its symbol-systems. Authors include Hume,
Marx, Bakunin, Nietzsche, and Freud. RLG313Y1 Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Karl Barth, Schubert Ogden and Karl Rahner on
the relationship between religious belief and critical thought, including the question of
God. RLG315H1 Analysis of rituals of transition form one social status to another (e.g., childbirth,
initiation, weddings) from theoretical, historical and ethnographic perspectives.
Particular attention is paid to the multi-religious North American environment, and to the
importance of rites of passage in the construction of gendered identities. RLG316H1 An examination of the theories of religion developed by late 19th and 20th century
anthropologists such as Taylor, Frazer, Durkheim, Freud, Van Gennep, Levi-Strauss, Douglas
and Turner. Their ideas about systems of ritual and belief in small-scale, non-literate,
kinship-based societies. RLG320H1 Judaism and Christianity in the period from 70 C.E. to 200.CE. The course focuses on
the relationship between the two religious groups, stressing the importance of the setting
within the Roman Empire. RLG321H1 An introduction to the first and second century Christian writings. A survey of the
surviving works and their historical contexts, close analysis of selected texts and an
examination of what these sources tell us about the early Christian communities. RLG323H1 An examination of the "historical Jesus" based on a critical study of the
earliest accounts of Jesus, with intensive study of the Gospels to determine what can be
said about Jesus' activities and teachings. RLG324H1 An examination of Paul's life and thought as seen in the early Christian literature
written by him (the seven undisputed letters), about him (the Acts of the Apostles, the
Acts of Paul) and in his name (the six disputed NT letters). RLG330H1 A study of some of the most important and influential attempts by Christians to
reconcile their experience and understanding of evil with their purported experience and
understanding of God. Selections from biblical writers, Augustine of Hippo, Thomas
Aquinas, John Calvin, Karl Barth, and Gustavo Gutierrez. RLG331Y1 The formation and development of distinctively Eastern traditions of Christianity. The history and major writers of Eastern Christianity up to the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The development of the national Eastern Churches up through the modern period, and their particular contributions to the Eastern Christian tradition. RLG332Y1 The central ideas of Protestant Christianity from the 16th century reformers to their 20th century heirs: Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, Edwards, Schleiermacher, Ritschl, Rauschenbusch, Barth, Tillich, Niebuhr, Moltmann. Analysis of pietism, orthodoxy, liberalism, fundamentalism, neo-orthodoxy, the contemporary situation. RLG336H1 Papal and episcopal documents dealing with social issues from Leo XIII (late 19th century) to John Paul II. Origins and development of Catholic social teaching; recent changes occasioned by anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles. RLG340Y1 A study of four great figures during critical moments in Jewish history, each of whom
represents a turning point: Jeremiah (biblical era), Rabbi Akiva (rabbinic era), Moses
Maimonides (medieval era), Franz Rosenzweig (modern era). Belief in God; Torah as law,
teaching, tradition, revelation, eternity of Israel, meaning of Jewish suffering, problem
of radical evil, history and messianism. RLG342Y1 The development and range of modern Jewish religious thought from Spinoza, Mendelssohn
and Krochmal, to Cohen, Rosenzweig and Buber. Responses to the challenges of modernity and
fundamental alternatives in modern Judaism. RLG344Y1 The religious and cultural roots of antisemitism and its manifestations in Western
civilization: anti-Jewish aspects of pagan antiquity, the adversus Judaeos tradition in
classical Christian theology; racist antisemitism in Europe (the Aryan myth); the rise of
political antisemitism; the Nazi phenomenon, antisemitism in Canada and the United States. RLG351H1 The revelatory process and the textual formation of the Qur'an, its pre-eminent orality
and its principal themes and linguistic forms; the classical exegetical tradition and some
contemporary approaches to its interpretation. RLG352H1 Aspects of the relationship of Islam with other religions and cultures. Topics treated
may include attention to both the medieval and the modern periods as well as to
contemporary challenges faced by Muslim populations in Europe and North America. RLG360H1 Hindu responses to Western influences (imperial and post-imperial) on Indian religious
life in the modern age. Hindu fundamentalism, communalist politics, secularization,
lowcaste alienation, feminist activism in India. RLG361H1 Readings in Vedic, Pauranic, Tantric and folk myths; traditional Hindu understandings
of myth; recent theories of interpretation, e.g. those of Levi-Strauss, Eliade, Ricoeur,
applied to Hindu myths. RLG362H1 Hindu ideas of self, world and ultimate reality. Hindu ways of interpreting sacred
texts. Readings from the Upanishads and later Vedanta texts. RLG363H1 Hindu ritual in its Vedic, Pauranic, Tantric, and popular forms; the meaning that
ritual conveys to its participants and the relation of ritual to Hindu mythology and to
social context. RLG371H1 The schools of Buddhism in East Asia, with focus on two principal ones: Ch'an (Zen) and
Pure Land. Readings in translation from their basic sutras. RLG380H1 A comparative examination of Christian (Latin and Orthodox), Buddhist, Confucian, Taoist, Hindu and Islamic mystical traditions. RLG381Y1 The role and social context of prophets and prophetic movements in the religions
originating in the Middle East. Illustrations from the literature and experience of
Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Islam. RLG384H1 The contemporary phenomenon of religious pluralism: its historical emergence, social
context and intellectual justifications. Achievements, techniques and outstanding issues
in inter-religious dialogue. RLG430Y1/431H1/432H1 Intensive programs of study including site visits and lectures in areas of religious
significance abroad. Preparatory work expected, together with paper or assignments upon
return. RLG440Y1 RLG445H1 The course offers an introduction to Moses Maimonides' seminal work of Jewish philosophy, The Guide of the Perplexed. Through close textual study, a broad range of topics will be considered, such as: divine attributes; the question of biblical interpretation and its proper method; dialectical theology and the status of imagination; proofs for the existence of God; creation versus eternity of the world; prophecy and revelation; providence, theodicy, and the problem of evil; divine law; the search for wisdom and the character of human perfection. In addition, readings in some of the leading modern interpreters of Maimonides' Guide will be examined. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor. RLG446H1 The History of Jewish Interpretation of the Bible from ancient times through the fixing of the masoretic text: inner Biblical, Greco-Roman, talmudic, midrashic and masoretic interpretative literatures; interpretation in ancient Jewish art and literature; interpretation without commentaries; Jewish Bible interpretation in the context of early Christianity. RLG447H1 The History of Jewish Interpretation of the Bible from medieval times to today: philological, philosophical, kabbalistic, and halakhic interpretation and interpretative literatures in the medieval, premodern, and modern periods; Jewish contributions to biblical criticism; Jewish Bible interpretation in the contexts of later Christianity and Islam and modern secularism. (2L:M1-3) RLG450H1 This course examines the views of nature and science which have emerged within the religions and cultures of South Asia, with a focus on Hinduism. Themes include science and nature in India and Sri Lanka, creation myths, cosmology, the earth, matter, humans, consciousness, time, and mysticism. These themes are discussed in the context of the contemporary encounter between South Asian traditions and the scientific ideas and practices emanating from Europe and North America. RLG455H1 The purpose of this course is to examine a number of the major developments in the history of Japanese religious traditions from the earliest known times (ca. 6th century c. e. ) to the beginning of the modern era (late 19th century). Following a loose chronological format, the course will focus on the relations between the religious dimensions of Japanese society and its social-political-economic dimensions over the centuries. It will examine the ways in which social-political-economic developments in Japanese society gave rise to and were reflected in developments in the religious traditions, and the influences that the latter developments may have had on Japanese society in general. Topics include: "Shinto" foundational myths, Buddhist rituals for the well-being of the state, the social-political-economic power of monasteries and convents, monks as civil servants, courtiers and noble monks, the warrior class and "warrior monks" (sohei), "mountain ascetics" (yamabushi) and popular piety, relations between Buddhas/Bodhisattvas and Shinto "gods" (kami), the extirpation of Christianity, etc. Required preparation: RLG 100 or a course on Asian religion(s). Recommended preparation: RLG 206Y, 273Y 2755(H) and/or 371H RLG460H1 Against the background of late Hellenism, a study of the importance of religious buildings in selected cities of the eastern Mediterranean (some possible cities: Caesarea Maritima, Gerasa, Palmyra, Beth Shean, Antioch, Damascus, Caesarea Philippi, Petra, Ephesus, Pergamum), during the period first century BCE to third century CE. The juxtaposition of literary and archeological evidence will be emphasized. RLG465H1 An examination of selected Christian and related literature associated with Ephesus (some possibilities: Ephesians; Ignatius, Ephesians ; Revelation; John; 1-3 John; Justin, Dialogue with Trypho ). Against the background of the city and its region, early Christian developments will be analyzed and interpreted. RLG470H1 An examination of major twentieth-century critiques of the technological society. The philosophical and theological writings of Simone Weil, Jacques Ellul, George Grant, and Eric Voegelin will be studied, comparing their respective understandings of the scientific and political infrastructures of technological societies and their reasons for fearing the emergence of totalitarianism within them. RLG475H1 Frequently today in discussions in bioethics dealing with life and death, even secular thinkers invoke the concept of the "sanctity of human life. " Yet that concept is clearly religious in origin. What do the three great montheistic traditions have to say about this concept and its ethical significance? Can this concept be separated from these religious origins and still have coherent ethical meaning? The course will consist of readings and discussion. There will be a midterm examination and a final paper (approximately 20 pages) required. RLG480H1 This course examines how religious and spiritual concerns within various religious traditions interface with contemporary environmental isssues. While introducing students to the issues and debates in environmental ethics, particular attention is paid to the challenge posed to the human and religious values of these traditions by the present ecological crisis and some salient ethical and religious responses to this challenge. Traditions discussed include contemporary Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and First Nations. The course will focus on the role of the human offered by these varied religious traditions in this emerging literature. RLG485H Advanced study in selected theorists in the psychology of religion such as Freud, Ricoeur and Kristeva. Approaches the topic both in terms of interpretive models applied to religious forms such as symbols and rituals, and in terms of models of religious subjectivity as related to self-knowledge and moral development. Prerequisite: permission of the instructor. RLG490Y1 1.pursue in depth a particular topic or area of study with which they already have some
familiarity, After obtaining a faculty supervisor, the student must apply to the Department, 123 St. George Street. The Administrative Assistant will provide a form which is to be filled in and signed by both the student and the faculty member. Departmental approval must then be given before the student may register for the course. RLG491H1/492H1/493H1 Student-initiated projects supervised by members of the Department. The student must obtain both a supervisor's agreement and the Department's approval in order to register. The maximum number of Individual Studies a student may take is two full course equivalents. |
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